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Joggers enjoying the Australian lifestyle at Farm Cove, near Sydney Opera House. Picture: Lindsay Moller Source: The Sunday Telegraph

AUSTRALIA is the most popular place in the world for expats, despite the relatively lower earning potential the country offers, according to a global report.

International workers are attracted Down Under by the outdoor lifestyle, friendliness and work/life balance, according to the HSBC Expat Explorer report.

They are also more likely to stay longer or settle in Australia permanently than in other countries.

But Australians living overseas found that while the benefits of an offshore posting offer a more global outlook and greater financial rewards, it comes at the expense of lifestyle and wellbeing.

Australian expatriates said it was increasingly difficult to manage the pressures of work and life and they were generally less active since moving overseas.

More than 3000 expats from more than 100 countries responded to the annual survey, which looks at factors affecting lifestyle like accommodation, ease of organising finances, and the ability to make friends.

It found 10 per cent of expats chose Australia as the top destination for their next assignment, followed by the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada.

The US and UK were chosen for financial gain.

HSBC Bank Australia head of retail banking and wealth management Graham Heunis said the report showed the importance of lifestyle factors in expat career choices.

"While financial rewards and career prospects are obviously important, the report suggests expats are putting lifestyle and wellbeing ahead of money and Australia wins hands down on this front,'' he said.

Australia ranked highly in terms of overall quality of life, work environment and ease of integration.

The report showed expats in Australia are twice as likely to stay or return to Australia in future than average.
 

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Australia number one for expats - report

The White House has a new election-year plan to stop companies from shopping overseas for tax havens.

While details remain sketchy, the concept outlined by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address seems crystal clear: Start taxing foreign profits.

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The administration figures that if the IRS gets to collect the money anyway, then multinationals have less of a reason to move jobs out of the country. The tax could deter companies from hopscotching around the world to whichever country cuts them the best deal.

“We are trying to discourage the race to the bottom,” explained White House economics adviser Gene Sperling. “We’re trying to discourage the notion that when somebody is thinking about where to locate production or services, that they should not believe that they can go to a tax haven as a way of having a tax advantage over a company that chose to stay in the United States.”

Still, with Congress and the White House at loggerheads at nearly every turn — and no expectation of change before the November elections — Obama’s tax call appears much more of a campaign rallying cry than a proposal on the verge of becoming law. The president clearly has positioned tax reform as a lever for lifting employment, blaming the exodus of work overseas on a misguided federal Tax Code.

“From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax,” Obama told a joint session of Congress in his State of the Union address. “And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here in America.”

In practice, though, tweaking taxes to boost employment might be easier said than done.

Corporate tax policy has become a source of tension for the administration. Union leaders objected last month when the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness recommended lowering tax rates to internationally competitive levels. Meanwhile, Obama’s call for a “basic minimum” tax on worldwide earnings could thwart any kind of consensus with Republicans on reforming the code.

Until the administration discloses more specifics around its 2013 budget proposal in a couple of weeks — like what the rate might be — Republican lawmakers and business leaders are reserving judgment. But not surprisingly, they have serious concerns.

Many congressional Republicans and several corporate executives on Obama’s own jobs council want the government to adopt some kind of territorial tax system, where the United States would not tax income earned outside its borders.

A territorial system would let companies bring foreign earnings home without being required to pay as much as 35 percent to the government. Business profits totaling $1.4 trillion are trapped overseas to avoid those taxes, according to JPMorgan Chase.

“If the rate is too high and the administration doesn’t intend to move to a territorial system like nearly all of our global competitors, then it is tough to imagine how this benefits American companies and the workers who we want to hire here at home,” a Republican congressional staffer told POLITICO.

The White House and congressional Republicans support the general idea of lowering corporate rates and eliminating some deductions to broaden the tax base. But because of the nation’s burgeoning deficit, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says companies shouldn’t count on a massive windfall from any changes.

“When we do tax reform, we’re going to have to be helping contribute to deficit reduction,” Geithner said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “We don’t have the ability of offering the American people or the American businesspeople community a net tax cut.”

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Bid to tax global profits political?

Westpac is the latest bank to trim staff numbers. Photo: Glenn Hunt

Westpac is cutting hundreds of jobs as part of its cost-cutting program, with Sydney facing the brunt of the redundancies.

The Finance Sector Union has confirmed that 560 jobs are set to go at Westpac, in the latest round of job cuts to hit the financial services sector this year.

BusinessDay understands the bank will be making an offical announcement this afternoon.

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"We're conducting consultations to a number of our employees around changes to Westpac," a spokeswoman for the bank said.

Westpac began consulting staff about their employment, and the Finance Sector Union said it had been informed of the bank's plans.

Jobs to be offshored

FSU national secretary Leon Carter said that, of the 560 jobs to be cut, about 150 lending operations jobs would be sent offshore.

The remaining 400 jobs were to be chopped from primarily backroom processing and general support roles over the next two to four months.

Mr Carter criticised the decision by the bank and implored the government to step in to support the industry.

"From our point of view, it's completely pathetic that an organisation that continues to make a multibillion-dollar annual profit thinks the only way through difficult times is to sacrifice Australian jobs on the altar of making more money," he said.

Mr Carter said the government should support the local finance industry with as much backing as it gave the manufacturing sector.

Unlike manufacturing, financial firms had the capacity to keep these jobs in the country because the finance sector was continuing to grow, he said.

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Cutting since late 2011

The staff briefings follow Westpac's decision to review 28 IT management roles in its wholly owned BT Financial Group and Westpac Institutional Bank last month as part of a group-wide restructure announced last November.

BusinessDay also understands that Westpac's business equipment finance division is one of the areas affected, with those jobs to be sent offshore.

The bank has been cutting jobs since the end of last year, when it shifted about 200 back-office jobs offshore.

On January 19, a spokeswoman for the bank said the bank planned to cull more positions this year.

"We can expect that staff numbers will decrease as we reduce higher cost contract-based staff and reduce duplication in roles at head offices," she said.

Thousands of jobs to go

Analysts from UBS tip that as many as 7000 banking jobs may be shed in Australia in the next two years, as demand for loans slows and households reduce debt levels.

ANZ Bank is expected to slash as many as 1000 jobs as it struggles with the weaker demand for loans and a slowing growth.

Employment in the banking sector has come under pressure this year, after the housing sector cooled through most of 2011, forcing management to trim costs rather than relying on growing credit for earnings. At the same time, job security is emerging as a political issue for the banks, which received backing from the government when the financial crisis in 2008.

Late last month, the protest group Occupy Sydney staged a demonstration in front of Westpac's office to protest at the bank's offshoring after a year of record profits.

Overseas, the falls in transaction levels as well as regulatory changes in Britain forced the Royal Bank of Scotland to jettison as many as 400 jobs in Australia.

Westpac's full-time equivalent staff levels fell from 35,055 in 2010 to 33,898 last year, according to the bank's annual reports.

The bank's shares were up 6 cents, or 0.3 per cent, at $20.91 in afternoon trade, underperforming both the broader market and the financial sector sub-index.

czappone@fairfax.com.au

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Westpac set to axe hundreds of jobs

Gov. Bob McDonnell said he discussed offshore oil and gas exploration with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday, but he appears to be banking on the Congress to speed up energy exploration in waters off Virginia's coast.

McDonnell said he spoke "sort of informally" with Salazar on the subject during a stop in suburban Richmond by Salazar to announce funding for Civil War preservation. A planned Atlantic lease sale in 2012 was set back until at least 2017 because of the Gulf oil disaster.

The April 20, 2010, explosion off Louisiana killed 11 rig workers and led to more than 200 million gallons of oil spewing from a well a mile beneath the sea.

McDonnell, who has forcefully advocated for offshore exploration, said the issue is "very much bipartisan" with Sens. Mark Warner and Jim Webb, both Democrats, taking up Virginia's efforts to tap oil and gas deposits off the coast. They also have appealed to Salazar, urging him to also expand the proposed drilling area.

"I think it's a huge missed opportunity for energy independence," McDonnell said of the offshore oil delay.

While he said he understood the Obama administration's reasons for scaling back planned offshore exploration after the BP Deepwater disaster, McDonnell said the nation can't abandon offshore exploration as it learns from that spill, adopts reforms and adds additional layers of industry oversight.

"We're Americans. We overcome. We don't give up," McDonnell said.

In a separate interview, Salazar said the administration is not giving up on oil and gas drilling off Virginia's coast. He said, in fact, that seismic testing is planned in a triangular region of the Atlantic to assess how much oil and gas is there.

Salazar also said Virginia's huge military presence along the coast is an issue. Norfolk is home to the world's largest naval base and ships regularly sail through Atlantic waters and conduct military exercises where oil rigs would rise from the sea.

"The major challenge in terms of doing the Virginia triangle is really a conflict with defense," Salazar said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We have worked with the Department of Defense and they have showed us where the conflicts are.

"We believe the Virginia triangle is not ready for development because of the military conflicts," he added.

Salazar also said the administration already has achieved its oil and gas production goals, without the addition of Virginia waters.

The proposed exploration area encompasses 2.9 million acres, 50 miles off Virginia's coast.

The government estimates the area can produce 130 million barrels of oil and 1.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Industry officials have said new seismic studies could expand on the number, which was determined decades ago.

Environmentalists are skeptical, and contend offshore drilling isn't worth the environmental risks to tourism and fishing. They argue that estimates of oil and gas potential off Virginia represent a just sip compared to the nation's big thirst for energy.

Steve Szkotak can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sszkotakap

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Salazar, McDonnell discuss Va. offshore oil

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